We recently ran a webinar on how integrating iPresent with Salesforce can save you time and boost performance. It was so well attended we decided to write a blog about it!

Integrating your Sales Enablement tool with the CRM

Many businesses are making use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to record and track customer data and contact. Among their many service offerings, a CRM will log emails and calls, meaning that all the information you need about your client – including all your interactions to date – is in one place. However, face-to-face interactions are much harder to record. So how do you make sure that your sales team is also logging meetings in your CRM?

In talking to our customers, it became obvious that this was a serious pain point of CRM and that something needed to be done to help salespeople automate face-to-face interactions.

Pain points of CRM

Our research turned up the following issues:

Salespeople are under continual pressure to ensure that they are updating the CRM.

Field-based salespeople who are often in back-to-back meetings over several days don’t have the time to update the CRM – and by the time they do get to it they may have forgotten the details of what was discussed.

Chasing your sales team to update the CRM is also a waste of time and an unnecessary source of conflict.

Pressure. Lack of time. Conflict. All these things can turn people against a tool that is there to help them. Clearly, manually logging meetings in the CRM is not a workable solution for busy salespeople.

How a Sales Enablement tool can help automate meeting records

One of the key attributes of a Sales Enablement tool like iPresent is that it tracks and analyses how salespeople are using content. The app records which content is used, how long it is shown for and in what order. This function helps marketing to develop a picture of which content is working and how the sales team is using the available content.

Bearing in mind the pain points noted above, we decided to expand this function so that it specifically records usage ‘Sessions’ and integrates this data with the customer’s CRM. This function works with a host of CRM software. With some it may be that the data needs to be manually downloaded from iPresent and manually uploaded to the CRM, but with others such as Salesforce, the leading CRM tool, the integration is automatic.

So how do you integrate your Sales Enablement tool with your CRM?

In iPresent, the user simply opens the menu, clicks to create a new Session and inputs some customer data in a simple form. If you have a feed from your CRM to the iPresent app, this form can be automatically populated with existing customer data. If it’s a new customer, creating a new client in iPresent will add a new client to your CRM.

Once you have started a new Session, everything you do in the app will be recorded within that Session and saved under a Session name in the iPresent Content Management System (CMS). Again, this includes which content is shown, how long for and in what order. When you end the Session, that information is saved. Next time your device is connected to the Internet, this Session data will automatically sync with Salesforce.

How can this help you?

Aside from the obvious time-savings, there are a number of other benefits to automating meeting records.

Reducing the pain points noted earlier will make for a happier, more productive sales team.

In some industries, it’s important to spend an appropriate amount of time going over details such as terms and conditions. Measuring the time spent with each content piece gives reassurance that your salespeople are in compliance.

Knowing which content your sales team spend the most time with for each client gives the marketing department a deeper understanding from which to develop new content. What do particular customers like to see? What do the salespeople find easiest to work with?

Anyone going into the client record in the CRM will have an overview of the last meeting. There’s no danger of repeating materials from one meeting to the next.

We have some helpful guides to integrating iPresent with your CRM, which we’d be happy to share with you, and we can also offer you a demo of what all this looks like from the back end if you’d like to learn more.

This information was recently presented as a webinar, which can be viewed here.

If you’d like to know more about what iPresent can do to synergize your sales and marketing departments, get in touch with us today.